Evaluation of Solar Cabinet Dryer Equipped with Heat Exchanger and Porous Plate

In this study, the effect of using heat exchanger on increasing the performance of the collector and solar dryer was investigated. Moreover, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method was used to simulate the heat transfer and distribution of thermal counters in the cabinet solar dryer equipped with heat exchanger with two outlets and porous plate. The results showed that using heat exchanger with half air mass flow rate for the first and second outlets (0.009 kg/s) increases the efficiency of the dryer up to 10.2% related to the dryer without heat exchanger. Excessive air flow rate inside the heat exchanger decreases the performance of the solar cabinet dryer. The results of the comparison between the CFD and experimental data shows that CFD method with 6.9% of relative error has a good correlation with the experimental data. Using heat exchanger has no adverse effect on the color quality of dried tomato samples.